Understanding Marketers Top ‘Pain Points’ When Using Geo-Data

Nearly 40 percent of advertisers surveyed by Verve and Forrester say difficulty understanding consumers past location patterns as well as how to accurately geotarget them.

By David KaplanJul 21, 2017 1:04PM

About 38 percent of marketers say they have difficulty deriving context from the historical insights about consumers when using location data, a survey by Verve and Forrester have found.

At the same time, another 37 percent say they can’t achieve the expected “granularity” when attempting a geotargeting campaign. In Verve’s analysis, those findings suggest that brands are not able to take advantage of “the unique characteristics of mobile in the effort to maximize advertising value for the consumer.”

The study, Pursuing the Mobile Moment, was conducted in June and was based on an online survey of 203 “marketing decision makers” in organizations that spend $250 million or more annually on advertising in North America.

On the positive side, the idea of location marketing has clearly achieved mainstream marketing acceptance. About 74 percent of the advertisers surveyed say they appreciate location’s value in helping to craft and deliver more “relevant” ads, particularly when it comes to “micro-moments“— those on-the-go periods when a need to satisfy an impulse (coffee, a place to eat,) come up.

Additionally, nearly half the respondents value location data’s omnichannel usefulness in driving incremental in-store visits. But closing the gap between recognizing location’s importance and the ability to get the greatest ROI out of these marketing methods is something that the industry can’t simply ignore, says Julie Bernard, Verve’s CMO.

“It’s not enough to point to the successful outcomes that leading global brands are achieving with location-powered mobile marketing; we have to strive for even deeper insights into what advertisers across the spectrum of mobile-marketing maturity are experiencing,” says Bernard in a statement.

As Forrester concludes in its recommendations, understanding that the quality of location data depends on the source, and how it differs in accuracy, scale, and access, is the first step that brands and their agencies and vendors need to be clear on.

“Limiting these differences means asking a few questions,” Forrester says. “Where does the location data come from — for example, a first-party SDK, a publisher, and/or a beacon? How accurate is the data and how is it validated? What types of location tracking are available for gathering historical insights, cross-device tracking, measurement, and attribution?”

In terms of the discussions that brands, agencies, and location data providers need to have, Verve CEO Tom Kenney recently discussed the ways platform companies can build confidence and stability in their offerings.

“For location-powered leaders and their brand and publisher partners, the high king is the technology that we use to make all this data and media and expertise come together in a unified way. It’s this unification that drives real-world sales,” Kenney wrote in an contributed piece this past month. “It’s the platform. It’s the result of the engineering inventions that empower us to execute with accuracy, speed, and overall excellence as we create meaningful and responsive mobile moments for the consumer.”